Michael Dean Clark's "A Small Compensation"
Bio: Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and literary nonfiction whose essays have most recently appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Angel City Review, The Other Journal, Punctuate , and The Jabberwock Review among others. He lives and writes in Southern California. Follow him on Twitter at @MDeanClark. A Small Compensation The last time I went fishing, I was 13 and with my dad, dropping lines into a glass-topped lake reflecting the Eastern Sierras of Kings Canyon at portrait quality. Around us the air hung drenched in post-modern silence: not a car or plane or mechanical noise in earshot. The sun dipped toward the tops of the peaks to our west and the hope was fresh fish for the dinner fire Mom was building at our back country campsite. The scene should have been an ad for the National Parks or Hamms Beer. It could have been, except almost everything about that moment was painful. When I should have been enthralled with the gift wilderness hiking has always been for m...